Political Commentary
Is an election needed?
Patrick Cosgrave
It is axiomatic in British politics that a Prime Minister never goes to the country except at a moment when he 'considers his chances of victory to be high, indeed, highest. Talk, therefore, such as is at the moment current in Westminster, that Mr Heath might be or feel compelled by the nature of the national crisis to seek a renewed mandate can be dismissed out of hand as the most arrant rubbish. If any Tory eyes turn longingly towards a sprightly spring campaign, especially one following an emergency budget, then the principal influence on them is a certain opinion poll showing Labour five per cent behind the Tories and the Liberals holding steady at about a quarter of the total electorate. All this is, of course, exactly as it should be; the British electoral system is a brilliant method of compromising between the hunger and thirst of men for,power and the national interest. It works at its best when, within the legal rules, the parties pursue their own interests and thus serve the interest of the nation. None of this, however, stops the rest of us from trying to make a judgement on whether an election would or would not clear the air and do good. , There is one qualification to be made to the generalisation above. It sometimes happens that a Prime Minister may go to the country not because he thinks a given moment is the best possible, but because he feels his prospects might decline with time. (And, of course, he may occasionally, as did Sir Alec Douglas-Home in 1964, wait until the last possible moment in the belief that it cannot possibly be worse than its precedent moments.) Mr Wilson in 1970 seemed, at the outset, of the campaign, exceedingly fortunate in the way things had changed to give him an advantage: he was influenced, among other considerations, by the deep-seated fear that matters could only get worse as the year wore on. Such a feeling might well incline' Mr Heath, or least his advisers, towards a spring poll.
It is also the case that hardly any Tory now feels that his party can be beaten. Such ministers and backbenchers as worry over the desirability of a general election do so for entirely different reasons. They feel that if their Prime Minister has to do another U-turn, and deflate, after all the growth gambles and promises, then he needs a new mandate. They feel, too, that the mixture of lies, half-truths and prevarications which currently make up government propaganda, could be swept out of the way if Mr Heath had another secure tenure ahead of him: five years more, for example, might even be security enough to persuade Mr Walker to speak frankly about the nature of the nation's energy crisis; and might even clear his mind enough to enable him to say whether we are really booming or not, and to say the same thing on the subject for a week at a time at least. All of these considerations have to do, you will note, with arguments about the relationship between the party, the Government, and the country: Tories, by and large, feel that the Labour Party can simply be forgotten, that in its present unhappy state it is quite simply incapable of winning a general election whatever happens: else, how could the people give a five per cent opinion poll lead to a government which has, whether it is its own fault or not, run into such terrible trouble? And even those Tories who so bitterly oppose the Common Market that they might even con
sider abstaining in the election to procure withdrawal from it by a Labour government, now begin to feel that the thing is collapsing under its own contradictions anyway.
The strongest argument for a general election at an early date is that it would enable the Government, if returned,to speak the truth to the people about the national situation, without any tiresome worries about whether doing so would damage their political prospects. The subject of Mr Heath and the truth is an extremely difficult one. No opposition leader of our time was more concerned with the honesty and practicality of his election promises: even the smallest undertakings involving an element of risk in their potential fulfilment, when they were put forward 'by his advisers, were rigidly expunged trom his election manifesto. Such a statement may encourage the risibility of his critics, but it is true nonetheless, and it remains true whatever the Prime Minister's later supposed discovery of the utter impracticability of some of the things he said he would do.
Afterwards, it became difficult, because there were different truths. There were truths only the rest of us could see, and truths only Mr Heath and his ministers could see, such as the truth about the advantages of entry into the EEC, Mr Heath, and much more Mr Walker and Mr Barber, then began to take to its ultimate extreme a technique first brought to perfection by Mr Wilson — the battering of the country with inaccurate or misleading statistics which were obviously so, but which were produced at such a pace that the critics despaired of even analysing them all together and in balarkce. Mr Wilson's first really major essay in this form of political deception had a breath-taking daring. The Child Poverty Action Group and others had argued that the poor had got relatively poorer under Labour, and that the quality of various forms of social provision had declined since 1964. Mr Wilson simply got up at a party conference and reeled off gross figures of spending, without bothering to take much account of inflation. By this method of reckoning Labour had spent more on the social services then anyone hitherto: but spent more only in gross terms. It took months for this deception to sink in, and a major part in making it sink in was played by the unlikely alliance of CPAG and Central Office. Mr Walker and his colleagues have gone quite as far. I have often commented in this column — and The Spectator has shown in its leaders, long before the oil crisis gave new and especially splendid opportunities for deception — on the fact that ministers could not seem to make up their minds whether Britain was in the middle of a boom, or on the verge of a boom that could be achieved if we kept our nerve. Actually, 1 expect they didn't really know, one way or another. Nor were they deliberately lying: it is simply that members of the last two governments of this country have cared so little about the English language and the structure of its meaning — so much, or so little — that semi-literate rubbish is the main contribution made by the publicity departments of Central Office and Transport House to the political literature of this country — that they did not appreciate the difference between the two arguments. Nonetheless, the oil business has lent a special twist to deception, conscious or unconscious; and that twist might be straightened out, if the Government had the confidence induced by a fresh mandate.
Incidentally, a particular confusion has resulted from the assumption that the'present British foreign policy towards the Middle East was designed to secure for us a continuing supply of oil. It was not. The deliberate switch in policy from the Jews to the Arabs was made by Sir Alec Douglas-Home at the very beginning of the life of this government; and he made it first because he thought the Arabs genuinely wanted peace, and second because he thought they had a better case than had been allowed. And, while I'm about it I might as well say that of course the multi'national companies are cheating Britain by refusing to pass ion to us extra supplies, from Saudi Arabia especially, and simply dividing all the oil they get between all their customers not specifically banned by the Arabs. In other words, the big multi-national oil companies, even those in which there is a substantial British stake, are doing what they are told by the Aral* except where they can cheat under cover, but not what they are being told by Britain.
Once one has said all that one begins to wonder if an election victory would actually ' produce any increase in candour. Such doubts influenced me some time ago to recommend seven-year parliaments in place of the present five-year 'stretch. I did not at that stage anticipate that Mr Heath would have had time to go through the entire cycle of policycounterpolicy-policy, from trying out the measures he was eleeted with, albeit briefly, to totally reversing them, to totally reversing the reversals, as he will be forced. to do next year unless the sheikhs have a sudden change of heart (and probably even if they do). The difficulty about a five-year parliament is that It usually, given the way the British system works, merely allows time for a government to reverse its policy once: if it was allowed time to reverse it twice, something of its fundamental capacity for learning might be obvious to the British public, and some increase in the truthfulness and candour of governments might be forced on members by events. I can, however, imagine the outcry if Mr Heath tried to stretch the life of this parliament; so I fancy the best thing would be as he has always wanted, to go on to the last possible moment. Who knows, by then we might even have some parties on the Danish model.
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